By now, many people know of the total indifference of Gov. Scott Walker and his Department of Corrections toward years of reported violence and sexual assaults taking place within the state’s Lincoln Hills School for Boys and Copper Lake School for Girls incarceration facilities for youthful offenders in Northern Wisconsin.
But that’s just the beginning of the dirty little secrets being exposed about incarceration in this state.
It’s becoming clear the Walker administration had no qualms about breaking laws—and bones—in an incarceration system for youths that, just as for adults, house racial minorities in remote locations to create jobs in small towns for white people guarding black and brown people.
The state perpetuates the cruelty and violence in those institutions by intentionally placing them where what happens to inmates can be kept out of sight, out of mind and (usually) out of the media.
An added bonus is that white, rural Wisconsin is over-represented in the Legislature as a result of the additional population of minority inmates in districts where mostly Republican legislators don’t have to bother representing them.
All the state’s efforts to hide the violence and negligence in its youth facilities have failed now that the FBI and Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice have taken over the year-long, slow-motion investigation by Republican Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel.
Broken bones, amputations and violent rapes of children eventually get back to their families even if state officials try to cover them up by falsifying records and neglecting to report crimes committed against detained youths to law enforcement.
Milwaukee Needs a Local Solution
Now Milwaukee County judges led by Chief Judge Maxine White, District Attorney John Chisholm, County Executive Chris Abele and Milwaukee legislators are determined to bring youthful offenders back home to protect them from criminal abuse just as Racine County informed Gov. Walker it started doing in 2012.
|
|
The advantage for community safety of local facilities, Abele said at a Community Brainstorming Conference on Lincoln Hills, is that young people held in their own communities have a much lower recidivism rate of about 10%, compared to a 65% recidivism rate among youths returning from brutal state incarceration.
That’s why local criminal justice officials opposed Walker’s 2011 closing of Ethan Allen School for Boys in Delafield in Waukesha County shortly after he became governor. Because Ethan Allen was closer to Milwaukee, young people maintained support from their families and others in their community who actually cared about them.
Here’s another dirty little secret about Walker’s shutting down nearby facilities and shipping youths three and a half hours away—a day’s journey for poor families if they can even get there: To the state, those kids are simply money.
Milwaukee County pays about $320 a day per youth to create jobs in Northern Wisconsin for people who have little experience or training in dealing humanely with minority youths from Milwaukee’s poorest neighborhoods.
Add severe understaffing resulting from massive early retirements after Walker eliminated collective bargaining for state employees and now yearlong paid suspensions of more than 20 employees under criminal investigation. It can regularly lead to back-to-back 16-hour shifts.
The ugly consequence: Angry, undertrained, overworked guards erupting in violence slamming the limbs of those damn kids in cell doors.
Even before the latest investigation, many Milwaukee County judges stopped sending young people to Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake because of the horror stories coming back.
Another dirty little secret showing the state cares more about money than child safety: When fewer children began arriving from Milwaukee, reducing the population, supervisors suddenly found reasons to hold youths longer so the money would keep coming.
Now Milwaukee County officials want to use that $320 a day per youth to create a series of smaller, more secure and effective detention programs in their own community.
That would create jobs and a better economy here instead of the North Woods. It also would improve community safety by diverting more children from crime and violence instead of returning them to Milwaukee County after they’ve been damaged from crime and violence committed upon them by the state.
But that doesn’t let the state off the hook from providing more resources for community corrections, especially if federal prosecutors find state officials from the governor on down have contributed to increasing crime and violence among vulnerable, at-risk youth in Milwaukee County.
DA Chisholm warned the Community Brainstorming Conference that the state was trying to shirk its responsibility,
“I think that’s in the back of their minds right now,” Chisholm said. “They would like nothing more than to wash their hands of all this and dump the problem on us with no additional resources whatsoever.”
The dirtiest secret of all about incarceration is the state has callously used it disproportionately to destroy the lives and futures of people of color they don’t care about to create more jobs and profits for others.
